Kylotan,
I would not call the copy/paste thing a workaround. It actually makes logical sense. SONAR is giving me more options and not limiting me by allowing me to paste anywhere I want. My only responsibility is to tell SONAR where to do it.
 
As for selection groups, you do not nee to hold down shift, just click in the body of a clip to select without selecting the whole group. You select the whole group by selecting the "HEADER" of one of the clips.
 
Just to be clear, SONAR is not the problem. Perhaps it does not perfectly fit your particular workflow, but SONAR has well thought out approaches that certainly work just fine.
 
If you prefer Pepsi over Coke that is fine, but that doesn't mean Coke is a problematic workaround. That is all I am saying. If one were to take a little time to see the logic (no pun intended) of SONAR's workflow and why it does what it does, the lights come on and life is good.
 
I am just trying to help is all. SONAR is a great product and I like to see other users get the help they need when using it.

Paul P

Sylvan
I do what you are doing all the time in SONAR.

 
Thanks Charles for such a wealth of information in a single post.
 
 

You are welcome. I truly believe in this product and it benefits our whole community when other users can get more familiar with it. I have more to learn too, especially with the MIDI side of things. This forum is a great place to come and be a part of.

Hey Sylvan --- Kasperky marks battlefrost.com as a dangerous website, and won't let me go there.  Don't know why, but that can't be good for your business given all the millions that use KIS.  If there is no reason for this, I'd contact Kaspersky and ask them to update their database, or to have a look at your webpage.
 
Kylotan - Sorry I didn't notice you'd been on here for 9 years.  I've been using a DAW or whatever since Win95, and before that on Otari 24 track at Beachwind Studio.  I use markers, but must be doing something entirely different from you as I cannot comprehend needing several hundred tracks to lay out an arrangement.  When I had the record deal in Germany with Crazy Life, we simply dumped a demo onto an 8 track tape machine, with a click on one track, and went into the studio in Essen for 3 weeks to put out the Mournblade album.  So 7 tracks to layout a structure.  All the stuff I do now, I do everything myself, nobody to blame, vocals, guitars, bass, keys, drum programming and think the most number of tracks I've ever used was less than 70, and that number is simply because I am laying out different sections of different instruments/vocals on separate tracks.  The greatest amount of markers I've ever use was maybe 10.  Did not want to offend, simply did not understand what your work flow was/is.
 
 

GregGraves
Hey Sylvan --- Kasperky marks battlefrost.com as a dangerous website, and won't let me go there.  Don't know why, but that can't be good for your business given all the millions that use KIS.  If there is no reason for this, I'd contact Kaspersky and ask them to update their database, or to have a look at your webpage.

You're not missing anything, the page is blank except for the title (and Norton doesn't complain).
 
By blank, I mean that there is very little content, even at the html level.  The page is just about empty, it only contains the title and an invisible table filled with non-breaking spaces.
 

Sylvan
I would not call the copy/paste thing a workaround. It actually makes logical sense. SONAR is giving me more options and not limiting me by allowing me to paste anywhere I want. My only responsibility is to tell SONAR where to do it.

I appreciate the ability to paste to different tracks is potentially useful but the current behaviour is unintuitive. It moves things vertically, relative to their current position, based on a selection that could have been made accidentally many operations previously, and which is not very clear on-screen. I'm pretty sure it never used to work this way in older versions of Sonar, either.
 
Besides which, if I select 10 tracks, from 1 to 10, it should paste in a selection of 10 tracks, even if there was nothing actually in track 1. I have to take careful note at cut/copy time of which was the first track that contained data, so that I can be sure to click that one before I paste. It's just needless mental book-keeping that computers normally do for us.
 

As for selection groups, you do not nee to hold down shift, just click in the body of a clip to select without selecting the whole group. You select the whole group by selecting the "HEADER" of one of the clips.

You misunderstand - I know how selection groups work when I want the whole lot selected, but I'm talking about the situation when I want to edit an individual clip after they have been grouped, which is common. This is why I rarely use this approach.
 

Just to be clear, SONAR is not the problem. Perhaps it does not perfectly fit your particular workflow, but SONAR has well thought out approaches that certainly work just fine.

Sonar's requirements on the arrangement front are worse than many other DAWs. That's a fact. You, like I, have learned to work around these shortcomings over the years, but that doesn't mean they're not shortcomings.
 

If one were to take a little time to see the logic (no pun intended) of SONAR's workflow and why it does what it does, the lights come on and life is good.

I've been using Sonar and Pro Audio for about 15 years now. I've taken the time. I have got used to the current awkward way of moving sections around. That's how I work, and how my last 2 albums were arranged. I train myself to do that extra click before every paste because Sonar now needs it. But the whole point of this thread was that none of this would matter if using drag and drop, because drag and drop is a superior way to move and copy data, delivering real-time feedback to the user about where the data is going to end up to help avoid mistakes. But Sonar doesn't move markers with the clips, making it hard to use if markers are how you navigate around the project.

GregGraves
All the stuff I do now, I do everything myself, nobody to blame, vocals, guitars, bass, keys, drum programming and think the most number of tracks I've ever used was less than 70, and that number is simply because I am laying out different sections of different instruments/vocals on separate tracks.  The greatest amount of markers I've ever use was maybe 10.  Did not want to offend, simply did not understand what your work flow was/is.

No offense taken. My track list is like this:
 - about 6 guitar tracks (2 rhythm, 2 lead, 2 or 3 clean), typically via VST effects
 - 1 bass guitar track
 - up to 20 synth tracks (MIDI and Audio in each case)
 - 1 drum MIDI track
 - 9 drum audio tracks
 - a handful of others (eg. sample tracks, acoustic guitars)
 
The drum audio tracks contain no data (they're just synth outputs) so I typically have something like 15 - 20 tracks I need to represent a given section of the music. (Half of the synth tracks are also just output and contain no clips, but I put them in a folder with the MIDI so they're visible and 'in the way'.) What I do during composing, is write and record into several of those tracks, then stick a marker at the top to tell me what it was. Usually it won't be as simple as 'Verse' or 'Chorus' because I don't know that yet. Instead it'll be something like 'Em power chords with arpeggios, variation 1'. I might do 2 or 3 similar variations with a view to revisiting them later. Think of them as compositional takes.  I'll generate a bunch of these ideas with the intention of arranging them horizontally on the timeline to make a song. It's not uncommon for me to have 30, 40, 50 such ideas in one project.
 
This gives me several reasons why I wouldn't create a new set of tracks for each section I write:
 - duplicating all those tracks is an extra step I'd like to avoid;
 - duplicating the synth and drum MIDI tracks require me to be careful not to duplicate the audio tracks as well;
 - the duplicated synth tracks would have to be 'divorced' from their audio track, making mix and effect application more awkward;
 - duplicating the plugins on each track would probably kill my CPU in no time (especially things like Guitar Rig and convolution processors)
 - most importantly, 50 ideas x 15 tracks is 750 which is Far Too Many.
 
So really, I just want to compose 'horizontally'. I think a lot of people compose offline and then capture their results in Sonar, not using it as a scratch pad like I do, which probably means they rarely have so many sections that it is difficult to work with. They can either have each section in different tracks, or they can just keep them horizontal and have few enough that it's obvious which one is which. Neither way works for me, so I use markers. But I'd like to be able to drag and drop everything to work more quickly... hence this thread.

GregGraves
Hey Sylvan --- Kasperky marks battlefrost.com as a dangerous website, and won't let me go there.  Don't know why, but that can't be good for your business given all the millions that use KIS.  If there is no reason for this, I'd contact Kaspersky and ask them to update their database, or to have a look at your webpage.

Barracuda flags it as well: Spyware.Exploit.BRTS.battlefrost.com
 
Regards,
Dan

dcumpian

GregGraves
Hey Sylvan --- Kasperky marks battlefrost.com as a dangerous website, and won't let me go there.  Don't know why, but that can't be good for your business given all the millions that use KIS.  If there is no reason for this, I'd contact Kaspersky and ask them to update their database, or to have a look at your webpage.

Barracuda flags it as well: Spyware.Exploit.BRTS.battlefrost.com
 
Regards,
Dan

Must be being blocked here too.  All I see is a black page with the title at the top

I totally use Sonar as a scratchpad.  In fact I don't comprehend any other approach, and why I don't participate in Kompoz (because the assumption at Kompoz is that you can lay out a jam of some sort and magically lay down vocals to make a "song").   Using a suitably vanilla Drums on Demand loop, I typically lay scratch rhythm guitar bits for intro, verse, chorus, bridge, lead, outro, then cut them up or stick them together to make sections longer or shorter to fit the lyrics that I'm writing as I go.  Once I have an actual structure that I can sing, I'll dupe each guitar track, pan hard L and R, and overwrite each with critically approvable guitar work.  In the song I'm working on that wound up being 6 pairs of rhythm guitar (12 tracks).  I'll then lay down a single scratch bass track, and use AD2 to write out the entire drum track.  Then I'll overwrite the bass track for real.  So 13 tracks plus AD2's tracks.  Only then will I insert markers to help with vocals, further guitar work, soft synths, and that special fart noise that makes all my recordings so unique.

Makes sense. I think the main difference here is just the sheer quantity of experiments in one project, and the number of unique tracks needed in each one. (I could ditch one of the 2 rhythm tracks, but the rest are essential.)